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kkleiner writes "A team has launched a crowdsourcing campaign to develop sustainable natural lighting by using a genetically modified version of the flowering plant Arabidopsis. Using the luciferase gene, the enzyme responsible for making fireflies glow, the researchers will design, print, and transform the genes into the target plant. The project, which was recently launched on Kickstarter, has already raised over $100k with over a month left to go."

Plants? Ok, how about potatoes, that way they could make them into chips, get high and solve the munchies problem all at once.:)

So long as we're at this, do it to cows also. Not for the burgers, rather the milk. THC bearing cheese on the burgers, and THC milkshakes. (Talk about happy cows.)Then you could make a fast food place specializing in stoner food.I can imagine so many bad jokes along these lines, but I'll leave the rest to your imagination.:)

I don't think you're going to find grasses that get sexually frustrated enough to really get down to business and secrete the juice.

THC grows best exactly where it already is. If you were thinking something more oozie, you'd be on the right track... A Peony ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paeonia_(plant) [wikipedia.org] ) seems like a more obvious choice to myself.

At some point in the not too distant future technology will advance enough for a grad student to transplant the gene to produce THC into some other plant. I vote for <URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae> Glowing plants are just the beginning.

"At some point in the not too distant future technology will advance enough for a grad student to transplant the gene to produce THC into some other plant."

No, you need certain enzymes to produce THC. Enzymes which happen to live in certain structures in Cannabis. The same enzymes would produce THC just as readily in a tube as in a trichome, and there's no reason to expect they wouldn't if transfected into algae.

While I think this is pretty cool and all (Avatar anyone?), once people get a hold of the fact that the enzyme is called 'Luciferase', things could get rather warm for the company (at least in the US).

The name is derived from Lucifer, the root of which means 'light-bearer' (lucem ferre).

Wait... So, God allegedly says "Let there be light", and it's Satan that makes the Sun? The single most important object of this corner of the Universe? Not just one of them, but he's apparently done such a good job of the "light bringing" that there are billions upon billions of suns to chose from -- variety being the spice of life, and all that. Yeah, I'd be pissed at my boss too if he ignored the beauty of that master piece and instead went all gushy over a bunch of insignificant ungrateful chemical reactions on a single wet rock; That's like giving the GUI designer praise for a stable kernel and file system. Oh, hey, I know, Let's cast the insubordinate angel down into the thing he hates most -- Nevermind him having the power to create Stars, all of 'em -- instead of oh, I don't know, giving him his own different wet rock and saying, "Well if you're so damn smart then let's see YOU make some life"; No, the prickish boss of the Universe wouldn't want to give anyone else the chance to outshine them, eh?

Seems to me Satan's just under appreciated, and the fact the world still exists would point to a god-like degree of restraint or at least pity for said mentally midgetized primates -- I mean, it's not their fault they exist. I can't fault the guy for tripping up the little hairless apes whenever the opportunity presents itself to point out just how fickle and stupid they are -- I mean, what the fuck else did God expect to happen? Seems a bit of a dumb thing to do, IMO, unless you WANT the humans to wind up on the short end of the morality stick.

Well, I guess you can't blame the writers since they hadn't invented the terms "plot hole" or "antagonist sympathy" yet and thus had to rely on the oldest plot-hook in the book, "irrational demonization". No wonder new UFO religions are springing up; I mean, if there's a market for origin stories this bad then ANYONE could weave a more believable tale and make a fortune.

Wait... So, God allegedly says "Let there be light", and it's Satan that makes the Sun?

No, before you launch into a long post... to late I guess.

"Lucifer" is an old name for the morning star (Venus). When Isaiah speaks of how Lucifer has fallen from heaven, he referred to a Babylonian king who was nicknamed or identified with the morning star. Although it etymologically can be read as light-bringer, the conflation with the myth of Prometheus is a much, much later invention.

Crafty. I'm certain there's a Water Boy joke in there somewhere, but I'm taking the high ground here Annakin: the "light bearer" gene shows interesting promise. On the speculative side, do you suppose there are fewer babies named Lucifer or Adolf?

Worked in the other direction as well. People would never have stood for illegalizing such a common and useful plant as hemp. Rename it as marijuana and demonize it and no problem illegalizing one of the most useful plants on the planet.

am i the only one here watching non-nerdish office comedies? this to me seems to be direct copy of idea here http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1479423/ [imdb.com] where phil and lam try to use this same idea to put firefly genes into plants (only side effect being the squirrel eating those plants died as she cannot sleep in that light)

Energy will come from sun, so the idea is basically to store it as ATP and/or glucose, and release it as light using luciferase. Is it efficient? More efficient than solar cell/battery/LED? At least it has a point: this energy storage system will need no rare element, and it will be disposable without generating any solution.

Energy will come from sun, so the idea is basically to store it as ATP and/or glucose, and release it as light using luciferase. Is it efficient? More efficient than solar cell/battery/LED? At least it has a point: this energy storage system will need no rare element, and it will be disposable without generating any solution.

Yes indeed. In fact it might actually screw the plants up and cause them to think it's daytime. Personally, I think it would be a better prospect to do this in a fungus. Some of them already glow a little [wikipedia.org].

I was wondering what effect the light might have, but from my rudimentary knowledge, if the light emitted was in the green wavelengths I think it wouldn't matter?

From what I can remember, I believe plants are normally stimulated into vegetative growth by light in the blue wavelengths, and into flower by light in the red wavelengths (or lack of if nocturnal flowering? is that right? I can't remember). Although this differs for some species (such as those that live in water) for the most part it remains true and would for something like Arabidopsis. I was under the impression though that green wavelength light has no effect on them.

Do you know if this is the case? or could green wavelength light still potentially cause etiolation in them?

Exactly. Luciferase requires lots of substrate to make lots of light. Chances are they will make very little... Actually, chances are three kickstarter money will fund some poor research that scoresby achieve anything but feed a few unemployed scientists.

Why would efficiency be a concern?Plant seeds, get a plant that stores energy of the sun to light up the paths at night.Where is the efficiency issue? How could manufacturing a battery and solar cell possibly compete with growing a self replicating plant.

There may be a ecological concerns, but efficiency isn't even an issue.

Photosynthesis is pretty lousy in terms of thermodynamic efficiency. About 1% of the light that hits a plant is converted to useful chemical energy. The plant will have to use most of that energy for its metabolic processes. Luciferase itself is a very efficient enzyme, however, so I'll generously assume that 10% of the energy that the plant captures can be turned into useful light. So the overall efficiency can't be much higher than 0.1%. By comparison, solar cells are around 10% efficient, and LEDs 20%, so at first glance the luciferase plant seems to be an order of magnitude less efficient than the solar powered flashlight my in-laws gave me for christmas.

In absolute terms, there is about 100 watts/meter^2 of energy in sunlight. If you've got a one-square-meter window full of the hypothetical plants sitting in sunshine all day, let's say they can absorb 1500 watt-hours, and then convert 1.5 watt-hours into useful light. That'd be comparable to running a 5-watt LED for an hourish, which could be useful if you could turn the luminescence on and off at will. But if the plant is glowing all night and only a portion of the light is emitted in a useful direction, maybe the window-full-of-plants would give off light comparable to the little cluster of LEDs on the front of my computer. So overall I'd say that the idea is not completely impossible, but still totally impractical.

Impractical, yes. But landscape with these things. Average 12 hours of light 12 hours dark, and you get 0.1% of the light that falls on the ground generated overnight. so 1000W becomes 1W, and that would be enough to line a hedge with, but not enough to read by at night. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Composition_and_power [wikipedia.org] for the power number.

So the overall efficiency can't be much higher than 0.1%. By comparison, solar cells are around 10% efficient, and LEDs 20%

The difference is that you pay to grow one plant, then it replicates on its own until you have millions of them. So you pay for the first plant, then the rest are essentially free. Solar cells and LED bulbs OTOH don't grow on trees - you're paying the same high fixed cost to manufacture each panel or bulb.

And if you think about it, what's hindering wide-scale PV and LED adoption right now? High up-front costs.

In absolute terms, there is about 100 watts/meter^2 of energy in sunlight.

The solar constant [wikipedia.org] (energy flux of sunlight at Earth's orbit) is about 1360 W/m^2. A bit more than half of that reaches the earth's surface - about 750-800 W/m^2 (the rest being absorbed by the atmosphere). The 125 W/m^2 commonly quoted is the power output of widely-available 15% efficient PV panels under ideal condditions at the Earth's surface.

Genome Compiler is a nice tool, but the luciferase gene is since long available to molecular biology and can be just put in the right vector for expressing it in the plants... why making everything more complicated? or do the authors just want to buy the fancy genome complier software for something else?;)

Why the hell would they start with a Brassica? The entire genus sucks for this purpose, with scraggly stems having few, small leaves - aka "low surface area" for emitting light.

You want a good plant to turn into a night-light? Go for something like a Chlorophytum, aka the Spider Plant. Lots of surface area, grows fast, impossible to kill (My cats chew one of mine back to the dirt every few weeks, and for three years that thing still keeps trying to come back)...

I imagine that they started with a Brassica because it's one of the most common experimental plants, and there's more genetic information available on it vs. most houseplants. Proof of concept work is best done in a thoroughly understood system, and if you're adding a gene from another phylum, knowing a lot about the organism you are working with helps to control for some variables.

However, I love the idea of a hardier plant with high leaf area!(I admit to fanciful imaginings of a calm voice announcing, "In the event of a blackout, low level emergency lighting will be noticeable in street-side shrubbery.")

How do you control this thing? Normal lights running off electricity can be turned on and shut off with a power switch. If you are going to engineer a whole plant to be a light source, what mechanism will you use to activate and deactivate the enzymatic process? One that is cheap, reliable, and convenient? Always on may be convenient in certain situations, but still wouldn't you want a way to control it? One can well imagine this kind of think wreaking havoc for astronomers (both amateur and professional) who have always fought tough battles against light pollution of the night sky. This can become a nightmare if such plants start growing near prime observation locations.

Adding the Luciferase gene is fine and dandy. But to get the plant to glow, it also has to produce the appropriate luciferin. The photo they use of a glowing tobacco plant was produced by watering the tobacco with luciferin solution and then using a very long exposure. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Glowing_tobacco_plant.jpg)

That said, the luciferin found in dinoflagelates is derived from chlorophyll (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luciferin) and it is conceptually possible to introduce the relevant algae genes into their plant... once the genes have been identified. This sort of metabolic engineering is a MUCH bigger task than the Kickstarter campaign people are planning for.

The energetic difficulty could be worked around by making the plant into a biological capacitor... where it builds up luciferin all day and then discharges in a flash at night. The plants wouldn't be of any use in landscape lightly, but they would be a really cool landscape feature. The downside is they might drive any local fireflies insane.

Luciferase genes are common throughout nature. Not just fireflies. It's just where they were studied from first. There's no heat produced - it's essentially the most efficient light source we know of. Far more efficient that anything we can manufacture. The actual reaction is not terribly different from one of those plastic glow sticks, just a biological form of it.

The only problem I see is that I just can't see how it's going to be very bright. I remember a classroom demo where the professor took purified luciferase and the reactants you need, and it lit up and glowed for a while, but petered out pretty quickly. The bio reaction is ATP-dependant, so having a plant with a bright light is going to have to consume tons of energy that the plant would rather be using to maintain normal processes.

Yeah, my first thought was that it's not going to be very bright. I did a back of the envelope calculation.

According to Wikipedia photosynthesis efficiency is about 3 to 6% of incoming sunlight. Lets call it 4.5%. That's the energy a plant uses to grow and just to keep itself alive - lets assume we can burn about half of that energy for light production without starving the plant itself. In fireflies Lucifer is about 90 to 98 efficient in converting energy into light. Lets say out engineered plant manages 90%. Next let's note that this plant is going to waste energy glowing even during midday sun. That basically cuts in half (or less) the amount of useful energy spend on blowing at night in the dark. Next let's note that the light is going to be generated inside the plant, but only a portion of it will make it out and be visible. The rest will hit internal plant tissue and be absorbed (remember, the very purpose of leaf tissue is to be a good absorber of light). The fraction of light that usefully escapes is hard to estimate, but lets call it 50%.

At this point we're down to about 1/200th.

Peak direct visible sunlight is about 440 watts per square meter. Average from sunrise to sunset will be less than half that. And with the 1/200th factor above we're looking at less than 1 watt of light output per square meter. (Note that we don't need to mess with the leaf surface area, we only need to consider the 2-D cross-section of the plant intercepting the available sunlight.)

The good news is that at this point in our calculation our wattage gets translated into light as if it's 100% efficiency. This means that a modest size BUSH that's 1 meter (or 1 yard) in diameter could, optimistically, glow at night with the equivalent light output of a 20-watt to 40-watt incandescent bulb.

That's probably close to the high end of what's possible, and I doubt their first attempt will be that good, but it is more than I expected. If you have good night vision, and if you sat right up against a bush, it may be just enough to (uncomfortably) read by. If all you have is typical size potted plant you'll only get a tiny fraction of that much light though.... maybe 5% of that.

These bastards are going to eventually kill the human race. GMO corn, wheat, canola, etc...is already in the food supply. Go to google and type in "gmo tumors" or "gmo infertility" to research for yourself.

Yup, I sure did. In all the whack-a-doodle sites, it was ZOMG You eat this shit and ye shal surely DIE. DIE a Horrible Tumor infested death!

Oh...... Wait..... CRIIGEN, an organization devoted to lobbying against GMOs Guaranteed to be honest and report only the truth.

Oh...... Wait...... The "researchers" Joel de Vendomois, is a homeopath, Seralini is the other scientist.

Yup, Homeopathy, that's the ticket.

By golly, this is sounding a lot like the anti-vaccine crowd, first degree murderers in my book.

Especially fun is that the Rats that they fed the fucking roundup pesticide live longer than any of the other rats.

Why don't you take up something with more credibility - like creation science.

Sounds like you read the Forbes article [forbes.com] and are just repeating what they said.

Especially fun is that the Rats that they fed the fucking roundup pesticide live longer than any of the other rats.

Just because they didn't get cancer from drinking the pesticide doesn't mean the pesticide-resistant GMO crops are safe.

And that's really the problem with GMO, testing sucks. There are very few, if any, meaningful and rigorous tests. Lots of short term test and tons of grandfathering in genes because they came from other organisms where they were not a problem. But when it comes to comprehensive testing that could reassure the general population of the safety of GMO crops, there just isn't any.

Given the history we have with things like thalidomide, DDT, leaded gasoline, fen-phen, etc it is not unreasonable that people be genuinely concerned about GMO crops, especially given how widespread they've become with such little public notice. Dismissing those concerns as the equivalent of creation science is at least as bad as creationism itself because it is just another misplaced faith.

The big problem with pesticide resistant crops isn't that the are genetically modified, it is that they use a ton of pesticide on them. The people eating them get more pesticide in their system. Pesticide is not something you want to eat.

It's impossible to "reassure the general population". See the anti-vaccine movement for proof of this. The general population will, in general, believe FUD. But Slashdot doesn't have to.

Given the history we have with things like thalidomide, DDT, leaded gasoline, fen-phen, etc it is not unreasonable that people be genuinely concerned about GMO crops, especially given how widespread they've become with such little public notice.

How widespread do they have to be, and for how long, before we stop hearing non-specific FUD about them?

And why are we talking about "GMO crops" instead of a specific GMO plant? Which one is the evil one? What did it do wrong? Why are all the other GMO plants guilty by association?

What are you talking about? They didn't 'grandfather in' any of the genes inserted into crops.

I'm talking about the concept of "substantial equivalence" [wikipedia.org] which presumes that genetic modification is equivalent to selective breeding and thus any significant testing is unnecessary. Even when there is no way one could selectively breed a gene across species the way GM engineering transplants them.

Safety testing is at best limited to comparing changes in the level of certain chemicals that already exist in the original version of the plant with no requirement to look for new substances in the new plant.

While I am sure there are some anecdotal tests that go above and beyond the level of treating genetic modification as selective breeding, the fact that the minimum requirements are basically non-existent is the issue of concern.

My personal experience with "substantial equivalence" is in the software world where many government defense contracts use it as an out to avoid rigorous testing of patches and point-releases but still retain various levels of certification. It only works through sheer luck in that world, I don't expect it to work any better with GM foods.